The best technologies are ones that work in the background and don't have to think about making them work. That approach applies to the National Communications System and its wired and wireless emergency communications systems, which withstood the test of Inauguration Day.
Unofficial estimates put the crowd size on Jan. 20 at just under 2 million people, and evidently a lot of those folks spent their time yammering on cell phones rather than listening to the speeches. Cell carriers worried that the traffic could overwhelm their networks.
James Madon, the NCS director, told me that he believed Inauguration Day marked one of the largest use of cell phones in one concentrated area in history and that the Wireless Priority Service operated by NCS for national security and emergency preparedness personnel performed as designed. He called Inauguration Day a "a very good test" of the system and said he'll know how well Wireless Priority Service performed when the carriers get back to him with complete statistics on cell phone use that day.
The Wireless Priority Service serves about 93,000 users nationwide and allows emergency users to grab a cell phone radio channel ahead of other users by first dialing *272 and then a number. Madon said NCS staffers and other Wireless Priority Service users placed calls from the National Mall with no problem throughout Inauguration Day.
NCS also used the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service, which has the catchy acronym GETS. The service provides priority service over wired telephone systems, and Madon said it, too, performed as intended. NCS advised Wireless Priority Service users to first use their *272 code to grab a cell phone channel and then the GETS universal access number (710-NCS-GETS) and a PIN-code to ensure their calls get through.
GETS has about 221,000 users, Madon said. Federal, state and local government officials, as well as players in essential industries, such as the electric and gas utilities, use it and the Wireless Priority Service.
NCS also fired up its ultimate fallback communications system, the Shared Resources High Frequency Radio system, Madon said. The system is independent of any new-fangled technology and can get the message through when everything else fails, he said.
Larry Hazzard, an NCS telecommunications specialist, said the Shared network consists of more than 1,400 stations nationwide operated by about 100 federal, state, local and industry organizations. It's tested on a weekly basis with about 200 of those stations.
Voice is the primary medium on the system, Hazzard said, but it also can transmit data traffic at a rate of about 2,400 baud, or the speed of a really advanced dial up telephone modem in the mid-1990s.
Though Inauguration Day was just one day, Madon said it required close to three months planning between NCS and all the wireline and wireless carriers to get ready for a potentially network straining event and was a partnership between industry and government.
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